Waiting For The Other Shoe

The dishwasher is on its last cycle, making that low grinding noise it makes near the end, and she is standing in the kitchen with one hand flat on the counter, doing arithmetic.

Twenty to twelve. The calendar hanging by the fridge has the month nearly full, and every square on it is ordinary.

The car passed its inspection with nothing at all on the sheet. The letter about the scan came and said no further action, in that flat way those letters say things, and she read it four times looking for the part that was not there. Her son called on a Tuesday for no reason and stayed on the phone for forty minutes. The furnace is fine. The dog is fine. Work is dull, and dull is the best thing work has been in three years.

Thirty-one days. She has been through them twice tonight and she cannot find the bad one.

And she is more frightened than she was in March.

That is the thing she has never said out loud, because there is no way to say it that does not sound ungrateful. She is in the best month she has had in years and her chest is tighter than it was when the news was bad.

When she was twenty-two she rented the bottom half of a house on a road with a bus route. The man upstairs drove nights. He came in around half past eleven and sat on the end of his bed directly above her head and took his boots off.

The first one went down on the floorboards. Then there was a gap. Sometimes a short gap, sometimes a long one. And she could not go under in the gap. Not once, in two years. The first boot she could live with. It was the second one she was waiting for, and sleep never came until she had heard it land.

She moved out of that house thirty years ago. Nobody lives above her now. She owns the ceiling.

And here she is, at twenty to twelve on the last day of a good month, with her hand flat on the counter, listening.

That is you, in your own kitchen, in the quiet.

Maybe it is not a month. Maybe it is nine days, or one afternoon that went unaccountably well, or a stretch where your daughter seemed happy and you kept checking her face for the crack in it. However long the good run has been, some part of you has been standing underneath it with your head tilted, waiting for the sound that finishes the sentence.

And before anything else, hear this. What is happening in your chest is not a failure of faith. It is not ingratitude, it is not a fault in you, and nobody in heaven is offended by it. I am also not going to ask you what it is about. It is not about anything, that is what this thing is like, and being asked for a reason you do not have is its own small humiliation. You do not owe anybody a cause tonight.

Something is behind you, and it is not the boot

There is a song about a shepherd that almost everybody can start and almost nobody finishes, and the line nobody quotes is the last one.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.Psalm 23:6

Sit with the verb. He chose it on purpose.

The word underneath follow is not a gentle word. It is not a puppy trailing after somebody down a lane. It is a pursuit word, a hunting word, the word for what a war party does across open country when it means to catch you. The man who wrote it had spent years being chased through actual caves by actual soldiers. He knew that vocabulary from the inside, in his legs.

And he takes it, and he turns it around, and he changes who is holding it.

So hear what is at your back tonight. There is something following you, and it is not the boot. Goodness and mercy are the ones doing the pursuing, and they have been closing the distance all month. That is not my opinion about your thirty-one days: Psalm 23:6 is His word about them, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts a sentence like that off a page and sets it down exactly where the dread has been sitting in your chest.

Look at the next phrase, because it answers the arithmetic you have been doing at the counter.

All the days.

Not the hard ones only. Not the ones you can account for. The good ones as well, which means the month you have just had was not an advance against something, and it was not issued on credit. Nobody is keeping a ledger in which a quiet March has to be balanced by a terrible April. You have not been loaned this good stretch and there is no repayment scheduled, because His word says goodness and mercy pursue you all the days and it never once says they are recoverable. The same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in your kitchen while you read it.

Now notice what the song never does.

It never asks the man to name the threat first. The whole psalm moves through a valley, past a table and out into a house, and at no point does he stop to produce a list of what is coming for him. He says what is behind him and where he is going, and that is all of it.

So put the search down. You are not required to identify a cause before peace is allowed to reach you, and you were never disqualified from rest by not knowing what you are afraid of. That is written into the shape of this psalm, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting at your counter for you to work it out before He does anything.

And then the very end of it: I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Look at where that sentence puts him. Not braced under a ceiling. Not sitting on the edge of a bed with his head tilted. Home, indoors, staying. The last word of the most quoted poem in the world is not the drop. It is the address.